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Empathy and money are not mutually exclusive: Judith Timson

Who’s to say that when it comes to how people’s complicated lives unfurl, Justin Trudeau’s empathy reservoir is any less full than Tom Mulcair’s?

Pierre Trudeau poses with his boys, Justin (top left), Michel (bottom left) and Sacha in the 1980s. Likle many of his contemporaries, Justin is the child of divorce.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, embracing MP Kellie Leitch after the sudden death of former Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, delivered a heartfelt eulogy at the state funeral for Flaherty. (Adrian Wyld / The Canadian Press file photo)

Empathy! Why am I irked that it’s the shiny new thing in political life? It’s the quality a leader most wants to be perceived as having, especially when it comes to the economic challenges of the middle class.

Tom Mulcair, NDP leader of the official opposition, recently slammed Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, son of a former prime minister, as a child of privilege who couldn’t possibly have any real empathy for those middle class voters he is assiduously courting: “The problem is Justin Trudeau will never know what middle-class means,” Mulcair said flatly. “He just doesn’t understand the real challenges that families are facing. Never has. Never will.”

It’s as though you have to have been poor to empathize with the poor, or disabled to empathize with the disabled.

Good old Tom, brought up in a bustling 10-child Irish and French Canadian family, where he really had to help out, before he went to law school and became a lawyer, bureaucrat, professor and provincial cabinet minister whose great-great grandfather was the ninth premier of Quebec. That’s what you call down among the people.

Justin, the son of the personally wealthy late Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, is also, like many of his contemporaries, a child of divorce. Despite the charming pictures of him and his younger brothers skipping along beside their famous father, he had to deal from a young age with a mentally unstable mother who has written about her financial problems. He became a teacher, and then as a young man, lost his beloved youngest brother in an accident.

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Who’s to say that when it comes to how people’s complicated lives unfurl, Justin Trudeau’s empathy reservoir is any less full than Tom Mulcair’s?

Who’s to say the full breadth of his lived experience hasn’t allowed him to identify with, much less understand, the lives of others less fortunate?

Then there’s Stephen, currently ruling us, son of an accountant, who grew up with no august lineage to live up to. He became a highly successful politician, but one perceived as partisan, technocratic, soulless and bloodless. Yet he recently delivered a tone perfect, funny and warm eulogy to his late colleague Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, one that revealed him to be a man of deep feeling after all. He was said to have written it himself. How’s his empathy meter?

Too bad there isn’t an objective measure of empathy, like the BMI (body mass index), where you can type in a few key experiences, statements and actions and voila, it tells you that when it comes to empathy, you’re either Mother Teresa or Darth Vader. Or like most of us, somewhere in between.

Instead we have to use our heads and hearts to discern who is truly empathic, which is generally defined as having the “ability to imagine oneself in another’s place and understand the other’s feelings, desires, ideas, and actions.”

In her brilliant new book of essays The Empathy Exams, American author Leslie Jamison argues in the title essay that “empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.” She’s writing about her role as a standardized medical patient who acts out symptoms and scripted dialogue while med students practice their diagnostic and bedside skills.

But what Jamison says about empathy among would be doctors applies to political aspirants as well: “Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all”. Empathy, concludes Jamison, “requires inquiry as well as imagination.”

It also requires action—fair economic policies, an understanding of what working parents need to both nurture families and financially survive. It asks you to be less judgmental, not assuming that someone requiring government assistance, or unable to find work just made, you know, bad decisions.

There are fascinating new studies that show the wealthier you become, the less empathetic you are. Researchers observed people in conversation, where the wealthier person literally tunes out the person relating his problems. Recently, another study showed that those who read literature showed more empathy for others.

Our public conversations today are extreme. They don’t allow for nuance. You’re either a richy rich tone deaf Mitt Romney dismissing the 47 per cent of less fortunate Americans who won’t vote for you anyway. Or you’re a lefty bleeding heart who needs a shower setting up a tent to protest income inequality.

I’m irked because Mulcair tried to limit the empathy conversation by labelling his opponent unable to feel or grasp anyone else’s economic pain — a politically strategic move perhaps, but one that doesn’t give him, by default, any deeper claim on empathy.

Beware the marketing of empathy, the cosy anecdotes, the Bill Clintonesque “I feel your pain” approach, the backlit superficial framing of a candidate’s life in symbolic terms of “I know what it is to struggle.”

Ask not how deeply your candidate feels for you, ask what they’re going to do about it.

Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson

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